If 2021 was the year of the NFT, 2022 is the year of generative AI. With the release of version 2 of DALL·E, OpenAI has unleashed world awareness on the possibility of synthetically created visual content. In its wake, developer and companies are proposing interesting ways to handle and interact with this new technology. Geniverse is now of them. Built on the premise that everyone can unleash boundless creativity, we sat down with multidisciplinary engineer, researcher, creative director, artist, and entrepreneur Javier Ideami to learn more:
– A little bit about you: What is your background?
My background is a mixture of technology, science, and art. I consider myself a multidisciplinary explorer of life, and technology is just another tool in this journey. You can explore some of my projects at ideami.com
– What is Geniverse, and what does it do?
It is a technology platform that facilitates the process of interacting with generative artificial intelligence architectures. You can use Geniverse to guide these architectures via prompts. A prompt is any kind of input that tells the AI what you want to achieve. Typically, these days, prompts are texts and sometimes images. In the future, we will see many other kinds of prompts being used.
– Other text-to-prompt image generators exist, some from major companies like Google or Microsoft. What is different and better about Geniverse?
The main differences are two: first, the interface. Geniverse (generative universe) provides a very large and flexible canvas that you can use to create and organize different constellations of generated creations. In the future, this flexible canvas will be adding different collaborative features to the mix. And second, you can interact with more than one generative architecture. So you can pick your favorite friend, your AI pal, and each AI friend has a different personality and different strengths and weaknesses.
– Is the intent of the Geniverse, in the long term, to create a community of like-minded creators in a Metaverse?
Geniverse is all about diversity. As the name itself implies, the objective is to produce a universe of possibilities. So, the more diverse the audience and the users, the better. It should all be a celebration of the many possibilities and unexpected directions that this technology can offer us all.
– Other generative AI companies are taking great steps to avoid misuse of their technology. What protection does the Geniverse have in place?
Geniverse has a list of stopwords to try to keep the prompt engineering process as healthy as possible. There is also a discord forum where any concerns can be shared. At the moment, results produced by a user are not visible to others (like it happens on some other platforms), which is a positive that avoids a lot of issues. This is always an evolving area.
– Currently, users are fascinated by creating content via text prompts, but this will soon die down. How does the Geniverse keep being attractive?
Prompt engineering is here to stay. In fact, it will become a very important discipline, a mix of art and science, from now onwards and for the next many, many years. What will change, however, is its nature. Guiding AI architectures are here to stay, but today we guide with text prompts and also with images. Later on, we will also guide with our voice, videos, sensor data, etc. The nature of the guidance will get richer, but guiding AI architectures is the nature of the game, and it is a game that is just beginning.
– Are you learning and expanding based on what your users are doing with the geniverse? And if so, can you share hints on what direction that might go?
The whole field of generative AI is changing and evolving at immense speeds. The way users behave, and the new research that comes out is shaping the future of tools like Geniverse. Therefore, there will be big changes coming up in the near future, especially in the sense of making tools such as this one more and more targeted to very specific needs of specific communities and in a way that amplifies the potential and possibilities of the prompt engineering process.
– Copyright. Who owns the copyright of images used in the Geniverse? And can they be used for commercial purposes?
This is a very fuzzy area at the moment. OpenAI, for example, states that what you generate with Dalle2 can be used commercially and it is owned by whoever produced it. This is currently where the consensus is going. That if you generate something on any of these platforms, the result is yours, and you can use it commercially. But, of course, we cannot know if, at some point in the future, regulatory bodies may intervene and change the rules of the generative AI game.
– What would you like to see the Geniverse offer that technology can not yet deliver?
The capability of generating and managing complete storylines and combinations of generations that can help you express messages through time as well as space.
You can enter the Geniverse by creating an account at https://alpha.geniverse.co
Author: Paul Melcher
Paul Melcher is a highly influential and visionary leader in visual tech, with 20+ years of experience in licensing, tech innovation, and entrepreneurship. He is the Managing Director of MelcherSystem and has held executive roles at Corbis, Stipple, and more. Melcher received a Digital Media Licensing Association Award and is a board member of Plus Coalition, Clippn, and Anthology, and has been named among the “100 most influential individuals in American photography”